What Do You Teach at your Glasgow Acting Studio?

Once a week this question pops into my inbox. Of course the best way to answer the question is for people to come to some of our acting classes in Glasgow for themselves. If they can’t, then a copy of my eBook Truth in Action would clearly help outline my approach for them.

The main difference between what I teach at my Glasgow Acting Studio and other schools, techniques and methods is that we do not ask the actor to enter and engage in the fictional world.

While imagination is important to actors, we do not teach that the actor needs to penetrate the world of the film, find and become the character, or work out what behaviours are consistent with the character. Other techniques teach that an actor must develop a belief in the Imaginary circumstances, in other words they must see the world as the character does.

I just don’t believe that actors ever really do that. At best I think they placate and humour their acting teachers or directors and they have learned through long years of trying that no matter how much effort they put in, they have never been able to step into the fiction. They feel guilty that they cannot do it, and have pretended that they can ever since.

We translate the fictional works into real world stuff. The character’s desires cannot be accomplished, if Joanna wants Danny to seduce her in the play, it can’t ever be achieved. There is no Danny, so he cannot seduce. Instead we give the actor a real world task that converts fiction into an achievable thing that doesn’t require the actor to pretend.

We ask the actor to understand what doing that task is like to them and have then really do it to the other actor.

And so acting becomes a moment to moment improvisation where the aim of the game is to create specific behavioural change in your scene partners to accomplish the real world task.

(It’s usually at this time that some smart Alec says, well I am not really going to shoot someone in the scene. No you are not, but you are going to do everything you would do if you were going to shoot them)

Once investment in pretend is taken away, the actors are able to focus on making a real world interaction, to stop ‘acting’ or ‘performing’ and get something done. Beautiful truthful moments appear.

Acting is action. Doing real things to real people. The days of pretend are numbered.